A. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to methods and systems for creation and distribution of promotional and informational communications regarding products and services via computer networks. More specifically, the present invention is an Internet-based system and method for distributing of interstitial advertisements, including advertisements comprising rich media files, providing real-time interstitial advertisement viewer activity tracking capability and including a relational database for storing data required for commands that execute selection, dispatching, tracking and display of said interstitial advertisement files previously stored in electronic format in a server. The present invention also relates to use of said system in a multi-level advertising business method that eliminates problems relating to the accurate tracking of sales attributable to advertisements placed on websites.
B. Background
Internet advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry inherently different from television and print advertising. Television advertising impressions are primarily served from networks such as ABC, NBC and CBS and their affiliates. Print publishing is dominated by established national and local periodicals and newspaper publishers. In contrast, the top ten mega portals, such as Yahoo and AOL, serve a minority of all Internet page views. The majority of Internet traffic is served from small special interest and personal websites that operate independently.
Prior art methods of deriving revenue from Internet advertising fall under two general approaches. The first is a pre-pay or billed cost per impression, or “CPM,” or cost per click, or “CPC,” model, wherein advertisers pay publishers to place their advertisement on a website according to the number of impressions served, or click actions taken on the advertisement. Usually these transactions are done through a third party agency who receives commissions based on a percentage agency discount offered by the publisher.
For the CPM/CPC model to work, a website with heavy traffic must agree to place an ad that an advertiser will pay for with an established advertising budget. For this method to be effective, the mega portal or network must already be established with significant web traffic to offer advertisers, and an advertiser's budget must be available to offer website publishers to place the advertising.
The second method is a revenue share model. With this model a publisher places an advertisement on his/her website and is compensated with a percentage of the revenue from sales that results from traffic driven to the buy site from the advertisement. The advertiser is not required to pay fees when the ad is placed, but rather, when the add produces a sale.
Current revenue share compensation methods are basically flawed in that their verification methods essentially boil down to trust. The methods for tracking of receipt of and responses to advertisements used in prior systems have addressed in a relatively inefficient manner. Typically, tracking of Internet-based advertising and user responses to same is accomplished by redirecting a user's response. First, a connection is established with a tracking system that records the user's response to the URL of the selected ad or link, and then, the destination IP address URL is provided. If an advertisement placed on a website delivers a customer to a different website for purchase, there is no way for the website in which the advertisement is placed to know for sure what has happened once the user arrives at that buy site. The website in which the advertisement is placed has no way to know for sure and if it is being compensated properly. In addition, the customer may visit the buy site later, making a purchase that would not be linked to the advertisement placed on the other website.
With most Internet advertising revenue models, payments are often tied to a function of the number of web users whom the ad reached. But with web advertisements, accurately ascertaining that number has been difficult and problematic at best, and, given a basic technique employed to do so, relatively error-prone, causing erroneous counts and ad charges. Ads are usually logged as a “user impression” at a web server when the file is served rather than after the browser has completely rendered the advertisement to the user. Serving the ad files does not guarantee that the files will be ultimately and completely rendered by the user's browser. As a result, web server generated “user impression” counts can be grossly over- or under-stated. If a user navigates to a new content page after an advertisement has started playing but before that advertisement completes and, by doing so, prematurely terminated the advertisement, a full impression is nevertheless logged—erroneously—since that advertisement was completely served. Additional errors arise if a proxy server is situated between multiple user computers situated on an intranet or a local area network and a web advertisement server situated on the Internet. In this case, a request from one of the website user computers for the advertisement files will be routed to the proxy server, which, in turn, will direct that request onward to the advertisement web server. The advertisement server serves one complete copy of the advertisement files to the proxy server. The resulting retrieved advertisement files will be locally cached in the proxy server and, from there, provided to the requesting user's computer. Should any of the other user's computers request the same files, the proxy server will provide these files, totally unbeknownst to the advertisement server, from its local cache rather than directing a request from that other user computer back to the advertisement server. Hence, the advertisement server will be totally oblivious to each additional instance in which the proxy server accessed the ad files from its local cache and disseminated the advertisement to any user's computer other than that which first requested the ad. Proxy servers can therefore result in significant under-counting and under-charges to the advertiser. In order for Internet advertisements to effectively generate revenue as an on-going stream of payments to the host of the ads, accurate user accounting is essential to ensure that an advertiser is not over- or under-charged given an extent to which an ad is actually disseminated.
Users of the Internet typically rely on robust applications, such as web browsers and browser technology, to handle and maintain the transfer of information between systems. Existing applications to communicate with a user via the Internet are based on the following two methods:
1) Using an Internet browser (such as Netscape and Internet Explorer, for example) that is installed and run on the user's computer to communicate with a server.
2) Having the user download and install a custom application on the user's computer hard drive to communicate with the server.
In method 1), the Internet browser holds specific objects (such as, for example, the history object of the browser itself, or a custom object supported by the browser) which can be recognized by the desired web server.
In method 2), the custom application installed on the user's computer is used to communicate with the server.
In settings where the intent of the user is to use the browser or application, there is little question given to the issue of engaged system resources or bandwidth usage, as both are fundamental components to the primary activity engaged in by the user. The current practice of launching an additional browser window or dedicated application to accommodate the new media, initiate the connection, or transfer the information requires much more computer resources than are actually needed.
With prior art systems, customer and website computer resources are taxed in requiring the system to launch and maintain an additional application that may well exceed the necessary capabilities required for the desired communication and, in some cases, even the capabilities of the system itself. Additionally, as browsers and networked applications are continuously involved in two-way communication between the website user and website server systems involved in the communications, the bandwidth resources available to the communication effort are monopolized at a level, that although customary, are perhaps more than truly required.
Advertisers seeking to utilize the global reach of the Internet as an effective and efficient medium for disseminating advertisements to consumers have had to deal with various limitations in technology and methods. Internet advertisements are currently in forms ranging from static ads placed on space provided on website pages, links to ads or other websites, as well as banner ads, both static and animated. A banner advertisement is created by embedding specific HTML code for that banner within the HTML coding for a given web page in which the banner is to appear. A website user's browser, as it interprets and sequentially executes the HTML code for a selected page, will compile and execute the embedded code for the banner and display the banner as part of a rendered page and at a specified location thereon.
In implementing a banner, whether static or animated, the HTML coding is downloaded to a the website user's browser. The file may be stored on the same server that stores the HTML file for the web page, or accessed from a remote server. The file may contain a graphic itself, such as in a graphic interchange format or “GIF” file, or a Java applet which, once interpreted and executed by the browser, generates and renders the desired graphic. Such files require time to download and must be downloaded and assembled by the browser on the page prior to that page being fully rendered. Download times for large files, especially when the website user's system has relatively low communications bandwidth, can be long enough to lose the website user's interest. Users have to wait a considerable amount of time before all the page components for multimedia content are fully downloaded to permit that page to be rendered. Such delay during a page transition often results in the user prematurely terminating the download and transitioning to another web page. Advertisers therefore often limit the file size of their banner ads in order to minimize page download and hence latency times. Banners are for this reason often less effective than desired, as evidenced by relatively low user click-through counts generally observed for banner ads.
In an effort to overcome the limitations associated with banners, Internet advertisers have also used interstitial advertisements, which are pre-programmed advertisements that are displayed on websites during the interstitial period between when a website user clicks to access a new web page and when the selected web page is displayed to the user. Such advertisements often include a hotlink to enable the user to “click-through” the advertisement to access the website designated by the website advertiser. The length of an interstitial interval, which is variable, is governed by a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, the number of files required to fully render the new page and the size of each such file, network and server congestion and attendant delays occurring when users activate hotlinks. Prior patents in this field disclose the concept of embedding an advertisement as an information object in a web page file in such a manner that the object will remain hidden and will not be displayed when the file is executed to render the page. Rather than being displayed, the information object is locally cached by the website user's browser during execution of the code for that page. Then, during a transition initiated by website user activation of a hotlink to move from one web page to a next successive web page, referred to as an “interstitial period,” the website user's browser accesses the advertisement from its local cache and displays it until such time as that next successive page is downloaded and rendered.
Other efforts have included “polite” downloading, which involves a browser on the website user's computer downloading from a remote advertising system server and ostensibly as a background process, file(s) for a web advertisement only during those intervals when bandwidth utilization of a communication channel connected to the browser is less than a pre-established threshold. Such “polite” downloading is intended to minimally interfere with other communication applications then executing on the website user's computer. The website user's browser displays the downloaded ad(s) to the user only after the user has not interacted with the website for a predefined period of time, such as by neither moving a mouse nor depressing a key on a keyboard during that period. The advertisement server selects those advertisements for downloading to the website user's computer based on a user-ID and preference information of the user and configuration information of the user's computer, which is uploaded from the website user's computer to the advertisement server when a connection is established between the website user's computer and the advertisement server. Though the files associated with an interstitial advertisement can be large, these files are advantageously referenced by the website user's browser during those intervals when the website user's browser is idle and bandwidth utilization of its network connection is relatively low.
By reducing limitations inherent in banners and engendered by download latency, prior forms of interstitial web advertisements, by employing idle time downloading and local caching, provide an improved capability to place advertisements comprising rich media content. However, interstitial advertisements as conventionally implemented continue to have practical deficiencies which limit their use.
Unlike banners, interstitial advertisements involve embedding HTML ad code, as a separate non-displayable object, within HTML coding for a web page. Unfortunately, this technique is inflexible and expensive for an advertiser to implement, especially when the advertiser, for whatever reason, seeks to modify ad content. Ad coding is manually inserted into each and every content web page that is to carry advertising. Consequently, insertion of increasingly sophisticated embedded advertising, such as rich media, in existing website content requires a large investment in terms of human resources, time and cost as websites, particularly large sites, increase a number of content pages available for advertising.
“Push” technology has also been used to attempt to improve on methods of placing and processing interstitial advertisements. A “push” application program on the website user's computer establishes a network connection with a “push” web server, typically during off-hours, such as in the late evening or early morning, or at a predefined interval. The “push” web server then downloads, or “pushes” to the push application advertisements and/or other predefined information that are to be played to the user sometime later. The “push” application stores all the “pushed” content files into a local database on a hard disk at the website user's computer and, in response to instructions received from the “push” web server, deletes those previously “pushed” content files which have already been displayed. The “push” application also maintains a user profile which specifies user preferences as to the specific advertising and/or other information the user wants to receive. As such, through each connection, the “push” web server, by selecting content from its database relative to preferences specified in the user profile, attempts to “push” fresh content to the user's computer without duplicating that which was already displayed. Stored “pushed” content is later displayed either on user demand or during those times when the user is not interacting with the system.
While “push” technology reduces download latency by shifting downloads to occur at off-hours this technology also has drawbacks which limit its practical acceptance. In particular, to access “pushed” content, a website user must initially download and install to the website user's computer a separate, platform-specific, software application program, as well as subsequent updates to that program as new push capabilities are released. These application programs can often require significant amounts of computer memory capacity. Since typical Internet users establish relatively slow modem connections to their Internet service providers, these users will find that downloading such relatively large program files, even in compressed form, will consume an inordinate amount of time and is generally impractical while the website user is actively using the user's computer. Downloading and then regularly updating a “push” application will reduce, sometimes considerably, the amount of disk space available to the website user on the user's computer. Furthermore, relatively few website users will undertake the effort of downloading and installing an application program to receive advertisements and other such information.
Other efforts to reduce the latency problems inherent in such internet advertisements have included development of various proprietary media formats. These formats employ increasingly sophisticated data compression, sometimes in conjunction with video and/or audio streaming. Rather than waiting for a media file to fully download prior to its being rendered, streaming permits content in a “streamed” media file to be presented in real-time to the website user as that content arrives at the website user's browser. While this approach clearly provides enhanced richness in content over that obtainable through a conventional banner, it requires a continuous real-time network connection existing to a remote web server. Any network or server congestion which stops the download, even if temporary, can suspend or halt the “streamed” media presentation to the website user prior to its completion. This interruption, if noticeable and sufficiently long, will likely frustrate the website user.
Still other efforts to address the shortcomings of interstitial advertisements in current forms have involved decoupling advertising content from a web content page, downloading advertising files through a browser executing at a website user's computer into browser caches at that computer and in a manner that is transparent to a user situated at the browser and interstitially displaying advertisements through the browser in response to a user click-stream associated with normal user navigation across different web pages. This technique relies on embedding an HTML tag into a referring page. The embedded tag contains two components. One component downloads from a server and then executes an agent implemented as a Java applet at the website user's browser. This agent then downloads advertising files, originating from an advertisement management system residing on a third-party advertisement server, for a given advertisement into the website user's browser disk or RAM cache and subsequently plays those media files through the browser on an interstitial basis and in response to a user click-stream. The other component is a reference, in terms of a web address, of the advertising management system from which the advertising files are to be downloaded. The ad management system selects the given advertisement that is to be downloaded, rather than having that selection or its content being embedded in the web content page. The agent operates independently of the content in any referring web page. Once loaded and started, the agent executes in parallel, with standard browser functionality, continually and transparently requesting and downloading advertisements to the website user's browser cache residing in a user's computer and interstitially playing those advertisements. In response to a user-initiated action which instructs the user's browser to transition to a next successive content web page and which signifies a start of an interstitial interval, the agent, if all the media and player files are then resident on the user's computer hard disk, plays the media files, through the browser and during that interstitial interval, directly from the browser cache. Advertisements are interstitially played typically in the order in which they were downloaded to the website user's browser. Interstitial play from the website user's browser cache advantageously permits previously cached rich advertisement content to be played through the website user's browser without adversely affecting communication link bandwidth then available to the user's browser. Thus, the full available link bandwidth can be used, while an advertisement is being played, to download a next successive content web page.
While this technique provides better capability to place and provide quick display of rich media advertisements, it still has the drawback of requiring storage of advertising files or agents on website user browser disk or RAM cache space. It also delivers ad files only in the order received. In view of the drawbacks associated with various web based advertising techniques known in the art, interstitial web advertising appears to hold the most promise of all these techniques. Yet, the limitations inherent in conventional implementations of interstitial advertising have effectively prevented this form of web advertising from effectively fulfilling its promise.
The present invention improves over prior interstitial advertising systems and methods. The present invention does not embed advertising HTML files within a web page, providing considerable economies to advertisers in saved labor, time and cost in terms of both inserting advertisements into web page files, and later changing any of those advertisements. The present invention functions totally transparently to a website user and which neither inconveniences nor burdens the user. The present invention does not require a website user to download or install on the website user's computer a separate application program specifically to receive web advertising or perform any affirmative act other than normal web browsing to receive such advertising. The present invention does not consume any browser hard disk or RAM space on the user's computer. The present invention also provides proper accounting to an advertiser by accurately and validly ascertaining user impressions of fully rendered advertisements. It also provides the capability to implement a multi-level advertising business method in which accurate tracking of sales attributable to advertisements placed on websites is assured.
The present invention accomplishes this by use of a dispatcher server that allows the system to isolate and manage a database of links to different pages on a website to a separate server (dispatcher server) database. That server basically allows the system users to link or connect pages in whatever order is desired and insert ad pages (interstitials) in between existing pages on a website. To envision this process, imagine pages on a website, but no links in between them—all links going to the dispatcher server that contains a database of page links for the website and knows how to find such pages (links) on the website. Because the website knows where all pages are it can show an ad (which is another page that may be stored somewhere else) and then jump to the next requested page on the website. In order to jump from the interstitial ad page to a specific page on the website, the dispatcher server, using a query string, passes variables (information) on this page location (and other parameters such as tracking parameters) to the ad file. The ad file can be rich media .swf file, but not necessarily—it can also be a regular HTML or ASP file that contains a timeout for viewing the ad content and a tag or the ability to jump to a destination page.
The present invention, in a preferred embodiment, uses file server direct connection technology to process ad viewer activity tracking data. This allows the system to send a tracking string with information (variables) received from the dispatcher server by the ad file directly to a tracking server. File Server Direct Connection, or “FSDC,” is a method to establish a direct connection via the Internet between a self-contained file and a custom server-based application for online secured transactions, statistic tracking and server-based data sharing. FSDC uses a .swf file or alternately an HTML file, which can send a query string directly to the specific URL for a desired server without loading variables from the file (or html code) or requests to the history object of the user's Internet browser. The use of the Macromedia Flash file is preferred because of the ability to provide instructional code within the .swf, and because nearly all client computer systems have been enabled with the Flash player as a result of normal Internet browser configuration. It is to be understood that any type of file that is capable of operation without the initiation of an additional application could be used in place of Flash and the .swf file; however, presently, such is the preferred method of operation. As directed by its internal coding, the .swf ad file establishes a connection, via TCP/IP, with the specified server which is the tracking server, as discussed later. FSDC is described and claimed in the applicant's pending U.S. non-provisional patent application entitled “Method and System For File Server Direct Connection,” application Ser. No. 10/316,431 filed on Dec. 11, 2002 and published on Jun. 26, 2003 (Publication No. 20030120727), the specification and figures of which are incorporated herein by reference. The coding of the .swf file establishes a connection to the tracking server so that a tabulation may be made, appropriately noting the response to the ad. As the communication to the tracking server is only made once the ad file has been opened, this is preferred over the prior art methodologies, which initiate the communication for tabulation prior to completing the link to the desired ad or site. In many cases, such tabulation is premature, as the user may close the window before the earlier desired material is delivered.